When Google asks a question like “What if email was invented today?” it’s hard not to be interested in the answer – that is exactly what the Rasmussen brothers did after they had finished with Maps.

It was exciting to join the collective consciousness on Twitter 3 years ago and there hasn’t really been a next big thing to play with, until Wave. Google are releasing more accounts at the moment and will no doubt scale this up towards the end of the year. It is still very early days for the Wave team but they already have some very impressive stories together.

What is Wave?

The 80 minute answer to this question is available as a video on Youtube. But if you don’t have 80 minutes, the short answer is that there are three parts:

• The “Google Wave” product is the website application you see in all the pictures. At first, this is what most people will be referring to because it is Google’s main client to access Waves.
• Wave is a platform with APIs that let developers build their own extensions to interact with Waves, like gadgets and robots.
• Wave is the collection of foundation protocols that make it all happen in the machine. It’s an extended version of the XMPP protocol (and more).

What have I been doing with Wave?

I started playing when I got my preview account in July. The first thing I noticed was that ‘realtime’ might sound simple but what it leads to takes a while to get used to. Everything happens very quickly! Even with a small group of users you soon realise that you can’t keep up with all of the motion around you.

Steve Hopkins and I interviewed Karim Temsamani, Managing Director of Google AU/NZ, at the 2009 Australian Leadership Retreat in August (watch the interview below). This was a great chance to ask about the structure of Google and how that varies to other companies, and also of course to find out some early details about how they are thinking about Wave. Over that week Steve and I were using my Wave account to manage our interview schedule and also to collaborate on emails that we needed to send out – the benefits of doing this in realtime instead of using a wiki or other asynchronous tools were obvious. We just needed more people on board already!

In the Innovation Program at Deloitte Australia we have been using Wave quite a bit over the past few weeks for a range of things. The most powerful example so far has been for producing collaborative meeting notes during conference calls split across a few cities. This is a very powerful way to make sure everyone is on the same page since you can see the notes appear in front of you and make changes instantly. When the meeting finishes you have the final version and there is no need for the usual polishing because somebody in the group has already taken care of that during the meeting.

This week I have been starting to consider in more detail what’s possible with Robots. Lots.

What makes Google Wave so interesting?

The themes that are emerging here are really exciting – here is what I have been thinking about:

Realtime – When everything can happen at once you can turn many serial tasks into parallel tasks. The productivity you gain here is enormous because there are less hurdles in the process.

State – When updates move to realtime there is no saving files, there is no juggling different versions of the same file between colleagues, and if your client crashes you don’t lose anything. This saves an extraordinary amount of time.

Connectedness – we’re increasingly more connected and Wave pushes us a little further along that path. I’ll talk about this in another post sometime.

Parallel – In most social situations and even with instant messaging most of the time you only have one individual talking at any time, but with Wave even though you might have one person talking you can all be editing the document at once.

Culture – The technology is only ever a small part of a change process, particularly in the enterprise. Not every company is ready to make the leap to this style of communications tool. For those who do, 20% of the focus will be on the technology and 80% on the culture the people share.

Etiquette – more complex etiquette is forming as new social situations arise. For example, it is considered very rude for you to edit my sentence as I’m typing it.

Overload – As more data feeds are connected to the Waves many people will experience overload and anxiety. This will create it’s own problems, and solutions.

Filter – How do we keep up with everything happening in realtime? We don’t, so we will have to learn how to search and filter in a very effective fashion to make sure we are a part of what we need to be.

Attribution – Things are happening too quickly to stop and worry about who made which changes (although you can rewind and see them if you need to). You create documents as a group and the authorship seems to more naturally belong to the group.

Federation – The Google Wave Federation Protocol means that developers can build their own clients to access the system, and that companies can maintain their own secure servers ‘behind the firewall’ if required. This scale Wave really nicely and reduce the barriers in the enterprise market.

Collective – Like social media, as another tool that connects us to each other more Wave is changing the way organisations operate together. As we become more connected to each other in a group we can share information and adapt to anything that happens much faster and more effectively. Those that do this best will see massive performance gains in the market simply because they can do a better job.

Robots – These are programs that conceptually act as humans in the Wave conversation. It’s hard to grasp where this goes but it’s going to be the really, really cool piece.. keep and eye out in this space.

Verdict so far: People are going to learn to surf, or they’re going to drown under the tides of realtime information!

By Ross Hill - October 1st, 2009 at 11:25am with 1,715 views